


That One Stint In The Psyche Ward That No One Knew About

by powercorruptionlies



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Character Study, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Headcanon, I'm Projecting Can You Tell?, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Maybe Canon Non-Compliant?, Mental Breakdown, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Purple Prose, Self-Harm, Set Before Canon, Suicide Attempt, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26448838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies
Summary: 'I mean, the warning signs were all there. I don't know if I'm pleased or not that they didn't see it.'
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	1. I've Never Seen Something So Decisive

The last thing Neil remembers is pinching the coiled part of the rope, pulling the loop down to tighten it. 

Neil had seen it on a movie, a TV show, something he obviously wasn't meant to see, because if he hadn't, he wouldn't be lying vegetatively on a pristine, cold, impersonal white hospital bed, right?

Right. 

He's drowsy, he feels dopey, and there's a fog clouding his vision that wasn't there before. Is he dead? Everything feels so numb and the facets of reality so distant from himself that he feels as if he may be - this is certainly not what real life feels like, Neil thinks to himself, before succumbing to sleep while the sun is still high in the sky, smeared across the thin, rectangular window on the left-hand side of the room, thin, tissue paper curtains doing a poor job at shielding his fluttering eyes from the searing white heat and bright light conspiring against him.

-

He wakes again. There's two objects resting in the palms of his hands. He's squeezing them, almost intuitively, and he's sure he must've been told to do so. They're soft to the touch, but produce a sort of painful resistance when gripped by his weakened fingers. Neil wishes he had the energy to panic, to feel concern that the neural impulses aren't quite reaching his fingers; or, worse, are reaching them and failing to be carried out to their full potential. He can only squeeze against the rounded shapes gently, a pressing twitch that just about dents the material, before he hisses in pain and has to draw his fingers back to a neutral positioning again. It's all too much. It's all too much. It's all -

The man in white at the end of his bed seems content with this, scrawls something on the clipboard in his hand, and secures it with an ugly clanking noise to the metallic bars that comprise the frame of his bed. He can see the soft shape of his mother to his left. Where's his father? He can move his head, though minutely, to the door - he isn't there. He casts his inquisition closer towards his mother, backlit by the dying light of the day in the window - his father isn't there, either. Neil falls back asleep, unsurprised, and not disappointed, either; not in his father, anyway.

-

He wakes again, this time for the longest (or, rather, what feels like the longest) stretch of time since he remembers being in the safety of his own bathroom. The bathroom at home is a lot similar to this room - white tiles, bright, synthetic lights, the faint smell of cleaning products that purport to be fragranced like the ocean, whatever that may smell like. Neil thinks that there's dead things in the ocean. Hungry, vile, ruthless things, that people tie up in nets and hooks and other inadvertent, horrible things, that agitate them and mutilate them. The ocean isn't as nice as everyone thinks it is, and he's seen some lovely, _lovely_ oceans. 

Neil casts a brief look around the room to find that he's unaccompanied. His mother's stiff, wooden chair is vacant, and the stern doctor and fleeting nurses are nowhere to be seen. There's a plate of food on the opposable tray attached to the headboard of the bed. It smells warm, and fragrant, and warm, homely, salty, hearty, meaty - nauseating, invidious, seditious. Neil pushes the tray away until it's at a one-hundred-and-eighty degree angle to the bed. He can still smell it. He breathes through his mouth, and touches his body beneath the delicate hospital gown. His body is tough and firm, very slight, and he can breath out again, some of the anxiety unwinding. He doesn't know that the reminder of the lack of space he occupies is what satiates the frustration, he never does, and never will do, but it does anyway, the pressure releases, and that's all that matters. He just knows - somehow, intrinsically, as this was never a conscious thing that developed, none of what Neil does to himself is - that denying himself this is what feels correct, something that felt controllable, like using a manual tooth brush as opposed to an electric one that are just starting to get popular in pharmacies and dentists, or letting his hair air-dry as opposed to towel-drying it. His father seldom ventured after his physical appearance in a vein of cruelty, and Neil largely accredits this success to his own self-discipline, possibly the only one he's _got_. 

So, he lies awake in the hospital room, staring at the ceiling. There's a square tile just above him that's hanging in its gap by a thread, like the tooth of a child about to sever itself from the strings of its gums. Neil ponders whether the vertex of the square - or is it now a cuboid? - would kill him first, impaling the solid crest of his forehead, or one of the flat, extensive facets would crush his bones into the soft, grey, organ, rendering him incapable of understanding the pressures of the world around him, the imperceptible increase in his father's disappointment that his son is now definitively, medically braindead, not just by his own omission, by some controllable accident. 

There is the control, again, always there, forever, there. Neil finds his hand around his throat. He finally registers how sore it is, how tender, how stinging. He can't see it, but he knows precisely what lays there, dormant, like a dead animal. A mottled, inconsistent, band of red and purple, impossibly beautiful colours marbled into his skin. The carmine of of autumn leaves, the violet of a dying day. 

Neil tries to push the tray away some more. He can still smell the roasted dinner. Some splattering of gravy transfers from the edge of the warm plate, the patterned texture of its embossing uncomfortable against his numbed finger tips. Neil can't get the liquid off. He can't lick it off like an animal tonguing at their wounds; he would feel like a transgressor, wiping it on the deliberately and purposeful, inviolable white of the bedding. The wood of the tray and the ceramic of the plate aren't sufficient to remove it. He splutters and stumbles around an approximation, a rumour, of an emotion for a few moments, before erupting into a dry bout of tears and sobs, no real meaning behind it and his eyes stinging in their dryness. Is he crying? Not in the traditional sense, no, but maybe in a new, reformed way, in whatever way the Neil that has been born from what he had thought was his final gasp cries. In the way that those small, friendly-looking capsules the doctors tip onto his tongue, followed by gently filtering water into his mouth to wash away the bitterness of the hard shell, allow. 

He looks to the room and he sees nothing. He looks to his hands, and sees some semblance of the truth. His hands had tried to do an honest thing, a reasonable thing, he thinks. He can always try again, he muses, and this seems to calm him down, reassure him, quell the beast gnawing at the wrinkles in his mind and the feral, ravenous dogs running circles around his body. 

Neil does not sleep now, he has slept enough. It's dark outside, and no stars can be perceived through the shiny glass. He wishes to see that meadow, that meadow of fire and light, gaseous, gigantic stars millions, billions, _trillions_ , of miles away, reduced to specks no greater than dandruff on a lapel. Neil coughs, maybe attempting to cry once more, but it rips at his throat and strains the rash resting on the top of his skin, a superficial damage that would just fade into himself one day, maybe in the near future. Nurses and people and things pass by the interior window, their shoulders and chests and half of their waists visible to him as the navy blinds had been pulled down over half of the glass. 

Tomorrow is a new day, he tells himself, though there is always the horrible, awful, convicting idea that tomorrow has already come. 


	2. Only Dark In the Sharpest Objects

A few days later, they start weening Neil off of the medication. He's still not sure what it does, entirely, but the haze that encompasses his brain, his vision, spurring the tingling in the tips of his extremities, dissipates slightly, and he can finally hear what the doctors are saying around him.

There's talks of milligrams and blood pressure and _reuptakes_ and a slew of chemicals that he faintly knows about from chemistry, and the extensive, ensuing summer schools and tutor sessions; but he refuses to believe that he's heard the names correctly, because he can't possibly need those sorts of things in his body, not in any context he's been told about. Neil then wonders if he truly understands chemistry, and maybe it clicks as to _why_ his father is never satisfied with him, because he must not know all of the possible uses for these drugs and compounds and mixtures if they're being used on him. He will try harder, next time, he tells himself, and then his mother walks in.

Her eyes are red and lachrymose and don't share in the smile evidenced on the rest of her face. Neil just smiles back and declines the sandwiches she's carrying with her. 

'How's my Neil?' She asks, smoothing a hand across his forehead. He realises that he's sweating from his hairline, the hair in his face cloyed together with something damp and sweet-smelling. 

'I'm okay. Where's my father?'

Her face collapses in on itself. 'He's... at the store. We needed some things.'

'Have you been here the whole time?' Neil ventures, sitting himself up against the stiff pillow. 

'I have, yes,' she says with a caution he's not unfamiliar with. 

'Has dad been here at all?' 

Her lips pull together into a thin, unpleasant line. Neil flinches and looks away, and she says nothing at all. 

A doctor comes in and interrupts their silence which has grown to be a third occupant of the room, curated and nursed like bacteria in a Petri dish. He looks surprised to see Neil's mother, and Neil feels the strength of the steady, gripping pressure in his throat rise and fall, a discordant crescendo. 

'Does he seem more lucid to you, Mrs. Perry?' The doctor begins, ignoring Neil completely, as if he hadn't the capacity to make comment on his own state of mind. 

'Oh, yes, yes he does,' she exclaims, gratuitous in her tone and thrusting her arms open like accepting a miracle from above. The cross around her neck picks up some of the fluorescent light coming from the strip in the middle of the ceiling. Neil's eyes prickle.

'How you feeling, Neil?' The doctor, young and firm, with well-kept hair and a tan that is inexplicable for the north east this time of year, says colloquially, perching on the end of Neil's bed - or, really, _the_ bed. It wasn't Neil's, it was nobodies', and it would be ostensibly another person's place of rest after he'd been released, and then another, another, another...

'I'm okay.'

The doctor and his mother share a look, a look he's obviously the subject of and simultaneously excluded from. This, too, is not unfamiliar.

He hazards the question he'd entertained since he'd been sober enough to think in higher terms than colours and shapes and forgettable phrases. 

'Why am I here?' 

His mother emits a loud sob, and excuses herself from the situation. Neil calls after her. She doesn't look back as she leaves.

The doctor turns to Neil, pulling himself a little closer along the crumpled bedding. Neil can read his lanyard, his name is Nathaniel Osipova, and the photo must be old, because the Nathaniel Osipova in the tiny simulacrum of him on the plastic bracket has curly hair, pale skin, and a rounder jaw. Neil wonders if he's ever looked like that, and feels sick. 

'How much do you remember, Neil?'

Neil tells him, only accumulating a sentence or two of evidently useless information. 

'Right, well. We have a bit to catch you up on.'

-

Of course, Neil knew exactly why he's where he is, but he just had to ask, just to hear it confirmed to him that he'd at least gotten _so_ far with the plan, that it wasn't a complete failure, or, worse, that he hadn't even tried at all. 

He and Charlie sit on the patio of the hospital, the final thirty minutes of visiting hours slipping away along with the heat of the day. He looks down at himself: legs exposed, arms exposed, the only thing covering him the short-sleeved hospital gown that felt as if it were made of onion skin or Bible pages, and felt just as translucent; then he looks over at Charlie: dressed immaculately, as always, a homunculus of his father and the other litigators at his firm. Charlie would be one of those people some day. Charlie likes to joke, sometimes, about going into medical law, because _'Jesus Christ, Neil, d'you honestly think there's any money in criminal law? Family law? Corporate law? Grow up,'_ and Neil having to hire him as his defence attorney because of his malpractices and eventual moral bankruptcy as a doctor. Neil always had himself in stitches, Charlie, too, whenever he suggested all of the ridiculous ways he could get sued by patients. These were the only times becoming a doctor seemed palatable to him, to joke around about doing it all wrong. 

Charlie, of course, asks him what happened. He watches Charlie watch him, taking drags on the cigarette that doesn't smell quite right. Neil counts the drags, wondering how fast Charlie would grow impatient: the conclusion, four drags. 

'So, I was at my cousins' house, right?' Neil starts, ready to dress the lie up with a song and dance. 'And they've got this _big, crazy dog_ \- ' Neil ignores the pain shooting through his neck and shoulders and arms and fingers as he gets up, ready to mime the untruth - 'and I'm coming down the stairs, right? And my aunt is just as nuts as my dad - '

'Siblings,' Charlie tuts.

' _Siblings,'_ Neil agrees, thankful for the momentum. He's lying to Charlie, he's lying to him, with a smile on his face and flailing arms. His best friend, who's always brutally honest: he's lying to him. 'So, just like our stairs, their stairs are polished, slick, slippery - gah. This dog just thunders right in front of me, completely trips me up, and - ' Neil runs his fingers along the mottled rash on his throat, and his entire body convulses. 'Land my neck right on the edge of the step.'

'Oh, _gross,'_ Charlie grimaces, ashing the cigarette before dropping it into the grass. 

Neil sits back down on the metal garden chair, the oddly-prominent vertebrae of his spine struggling to find a home in and amongst the elaborate designs on the back of the chair. His body aches and twitches uncomfortably, thought it can easily be put down to shivering in the chill of the gloaming. A nurse appears in the door, and informs the pair that Charlie needs to go. 

Charlie stands up and hugs Neil close. Neil can't remember the last time he'd been hugged, not like this, and holds Charlie maybe a little too tight around his shoulders, his mouth touching the tender dip in between his clavicle and throat too completely. Charlie, unsurprisingly, is the first one to pull away, with a clap on Neil's shoulders.

'Take care of yourself, Perry. I can't have you dying on me.'

Neil's entire body grows cold, cold, cold, cold. 

'I wouldn't ever. Who'd employ your legal council, if not me?'

The pair walk inside together, Charlie's hand still on the small of Neil's back; that is, until Neil's father appears in their line of sight, stern and with his hands folded pointedly in front of his thighs. 

'I'm sure I could deceive another poor schmuck, but there's nothing like your first.' 

'Goodbye, Dalton,' Neil says with feigned distaste. 

'Catch you later. Nice to see you, Mr. Perry...' 

Neil just about catches Charlie addressing his father, who smiles curtly and opens his mouth, words coming out that Neil can't hear for the blood rushing in his ears. He folds his arms around himself, minimising his form as not to have any potential to overpower his father. Charlie leaves with a final wave over his shoulder, and the room dims a little as the doors swing shut behind him, in and out of the frame, losing any and all momentum as Neil's father speaks again.

'We need to have a discussion, Neil.' 


End file.
